Throughout his life, Hawthorne was haunted by the power of medicine. In 1821, when he was seventeen and headed to college, he explained in a letter to his mother why he could not become a doctor: “it would weigh very heavily on my Conscience if . . . I should chance to send any unlucky Patient... to the realms below.” Medicine, he continued, is a parasitic profession that depends upon “the Diseases and Infirmities of [one’s] fellow Creatures.”1 Only a few years after “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne turned to the topic again, making one of the central characters in The Scarlet Letter a vengeful physician who pries into the heart of a man who has cuckolded him. Late in life Hawthorne returned yet again, almost compulsively it would seem, to medicine’s power to do evil. One unfinished work, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, is about a young American’s discovery of his English past and the odd medical man who raises him. In the first draft there is no physician, but in subsequent drafts Hawthorne more fully elaborated his study of the doctor.2 He changes from a “perfectly loveable old gentleman” whose house is filled with cobwebs to a grim alcoholic who beats the young boy and broods over his failed efforts to distill the elixir of life from spider webs.3 In another unfinished work, “The Dolliver Romance,” Hawthorne considers the fate of an apothecary who inherits the notebooks and potions of a brilliant medical scientist. The apothecary resists the temptation to experiment, but his son cannot and both the son and a townsman die as a result of ambition, vain desires, and meddling with dangerous chemicals.4
In all these texts, Hawthorne is both disturbed and intrigued by medicine’s somatic powers. The young Hawthorne recoils from medicine when he realizes that doctors have the power to kill, and he shudders at the thought of becoming a doctor and thus profiting from the infirmities of others. As a writer, he shudders again (and would have his readers also shudder) at the thought of what ambitious medical men might do. Hawthorne’s doctors are driven by a desire for knowledge. They experiment recklessly, seek mastery over the bodies of others, and believe that eventually they may be able to control life and defy death. But they always fail: their withered bodies testify to intellectual passions nurtured at the expense of their own bodies, and their desire to know and master yields only death.
Of course, the mad medical scientist was, and still is, a common trope for the arrogant desire to play God. But Hawthorne’s repeated use of the trope suggests that the evil medical man was not just a stock figure for him. Indeed, Hawthorne wrote again and again about medical ambition because he was genuinely troubled by the increasingly confident claim to somatic mastery that medicine was making in those years.
Doctors had good reason to be confident in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Pathology was rapidly becoming a rigorous science that promised a radical new understanding of disease, opportunities to do autopsies were increasing, and pathologists were finding success in their efforts to correlate postmortem findings with clinical symptoms (a method still used today). With these opportunities and successes, pathologists began to “anatomize disease,” to understand disease as a result of anatomical changes in internal organs (usually apparent in visible lesions) and to understand external manifestations of illness as a result of internal lesions.5 In the new paradigm, disease was less likely to be understood as a systemic imbalance of fluids, and diagnosis was less a matter of interpreting a patient’s story than seeing and reading somatic signs. The art of healing was becoming the science of medicine.
As a lover of ambiguity and “significatory excess,” Hawthorne was wary of medicine’s eagerness to train an empirical gaze upon the body.6 Of course, his preference for romance, even as realism became the highbrow genre of choice, has long been understood as evidence of his resistance to empiricism in general and of a preference for shadowy worlds and symbols laden with meanings. But in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” tales in which medical men and their experiments take center stage, Hawthorne challenges quite specifically medicine’s belief that it can know the body empirically. In these tales, Hawthorne probes the manic psychology of medical ambition and thus undermines more decorous images of scientists as rational and objective. Pathologists may believe they see what is there—on the surface of the body or buried deep inside. But Hawthorne suggests that medicine’s will to know is fueled and tainted by a dangerous mix of intellectual ambition, professional arrogance, and sexual desire. Hawthorne’s medical men do not simply see somatic facts; rather, they reduce the body to a thing they can know and remake. But the body exceeds medicine’s grasp, and medicine’s desire to know the body is figured as a violation of the body, as a rape of the obdurate body.
In both tales, Hawthorne’s experimenters commit acts that are akin to the “indescribable outrage” that Sir William Bradshaw commits against the shell-shocked Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. According to Virginia Woolf, doctors such as Bradshaw want to force the soul, to impose order on consciousness and thus deny the fluid inner world of sensory impressions and memories. According to Hawthorne, medicine seeks to impose order on the body by reducing somatic signs to empirical data, and thus medicine is often eager to deny the many and indeterminate meanings of bodily signs. But unlike Woolf, Hawthorne is not only aghast at medicine’s efforts, he returns repeatedly to writing about medical ambition because medicine’s project to read and write the body was also his own.
In Hawthorne’s first tale of medical ambition, a mad medical scientist kills his wife while trying to expunge a faint birthmark on her cheek. Both a tale of ambition and a coy tale about newlyweds, “The Birthmark” was written when Hawthorne was newly married and cautiously hopeful about his own career. He began writing early in his life and worked hard, but success came slowly. For twelve years, between 1825 and 1837, Hawthorne wrote and, for the most part, failed. He wrote a historical novel that he paid to have published and then sought to suppress, a collection of tales that he tried to get published but ended up burning, and a variety of tales that appeared individually in magazines and annuals but never as a collection, despite his efforts.
At the end of this period, Twice-Told Tales appeared, and it was reviewed favorably. Hawthorne was both pleased and wary, noting in his journal with a touch of self-mockery: “In this dismal and sordid chamber FAME was won.”7 He was now thirty-three, and still, as Henry James noted in his biography, “poor and solitary” and still devoted to writing even though he lived “in a community in which the interest in literature was as yet of the smallest.”8 Twice-Told Tales would not, Hawthorne knew, bring him significant income, even if it did bring him some fame. By the end of the next year, he was engaged to be married and was perhaps even more aware that a commitment to authorship as a career was economically risky. In the next few years, he tried to make money; he worked as a salt and coal measurer in the Boston Custom House, and he joined Brook Farms and invested funds in the project. At the same time, he worried in a letter to his editors that he might never write again.
In 1842 he finally married and settled into a house in Concord, rented from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s step-uncle. Now, Hawthorne must have presumed, he would write, and yet it is clear that he still worried. He noted within the year, “I could be happy as a squash, and much in the same mode. But the necessity of keeping my brains at work eats into my comfort as the squash-bugs do into the heart of vines. I keep myself uneasy, and produce little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.”9 Public success was important to Hawthorne, and throughout these years, he was attentive to the prestige and financial rewards accorded successful writers. He followed Longfellow’s career, and with this former Bowdoin classmate he planned though never executed various literary projects that both imagined would be popular and aesthetic successes. Hawthorne was also sensitive to the status accorded other public officials and professionals, and shortly after they moved into the Concord